Change 'authoritarian' football culture to produce future stars, says research

April 23, 2014

Premier League soccer stars are subjecting their club's junior players to regular insults and practical jokes in a humiliating rite of passage, the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Leeds heard today.

This was part of an "authoritarian" treatment of youth team players which undermined attempts to change the culture of clubs and produce better footballers, Dr Chris Platts, of Sheffield Hallam University's Academy of Sport and Physical Activity, said.

One Premier League team youth player told Dr Platts that first-team footballers in his club once forced another youth player into a laundry basket and then dragged this into the showers. "If you bite (fight) back, they'll just keep doing it," another player said.

Dr Platts told the conference: "It's not unusual for youth players to be the butt of jokes, be talked down, to or in extreme cases be on the end of verbal or physical punishment."

Other examples given by the players were having their possessions hidden as a trick, or being "battered" (mocked). One youth player told Dr Platts: "In football clubs people batter you all the time and you just got to take it as a joke."

Another said: "If you answer back then you are going to be in even more shit, aren't you - if you answer back to the first team? Once they know you're biting they'll just keep doing it to you."

Dr Platts said: "What was particularly difficult for the younger players was the way in which their treatment by professionals provoked negative emotions towards players whom they held in such high esteem because they had made it as a professional player."

One coach told Dr Platts that clubs were "probably like a grown-ups school playground, and it can be quite cutting if you are not used to it."

The youth players reported that the coaches could also be disrespectful. One Premier League youth player said that a coach had addressed him with the words "Listen, bollocks" and another said his coach could "make a show" of someone by criticising them publicly.

Dr Platts noted that coaches often adopted "deep-rooted authoritarian approaches" to ensure youth players were always aware they had not yet made the grade. One Championship club made its youth players write a log of mistakes they had made on the pitch. The coach told Dr Platts: "So when it comes to telling players, parents, whoever, that they are not getting it [a contract with the main team], if they were unsure about the decision, I'd open the book and say 'well, these are the reasons'."

Dr Platts noted that the Premier League and Football Association had launched the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) to improve the development of youth players.

"However, the findings of this research suggest that the deep-rooted culture that exists within Academy football will serve to undermine the effectiveness of any policy.

"What policies such as the EPPP fail to consider is that, for many in football, being able to tolerate the treatment of coaches and professional players is viewed as a rite of passage by younger players. The younger players must learn that central to surviving in this particular workplace is to accept that they will routinely be subject to practical jokes, some of which may be humiliating, but are presented as helping to build character.

"While the EPPP might be regarded as a step in the right direction for player welfare, in practical terms it is unlikely to achieve its desired outcome without radical changes in the deep-seated cultures of the game. Many of the findings presented here are similar to those found in similar studies published 20 years ago.

"Evidence gained from these interviews suggests that the masculine culture of professional football based on controlling mechanisms such as banter do as much damage to young players socially and psychologically as they enhance their welfare. For Academies to produce better players, and if player welfare is regarded as important, they must move away from such authoritarian forms of discipline and control."

Related Stories

UEFA's 'Home-Grown Player' (HGP) rule resulted in modest improvements in the competitive balance of teams, but not at a level significant enough to outweigh the restrictions it imposes on the movement of players, according ...

Millions of pounds may be splashed on elite footballers in the English Premier League, but it is those who play in the second and third tier of football who run further on the pitch, new research reveals.

Every year billions of people across the globe tune in to watch the UEFA Champions League in which men compete, yet the number who tune-in to watch the female equivalent is miniscule and research carried out at a North East ...

Tiny Anolis lizards preserved since the Miocene in amber are giving scientists a true appreciation of the meaning of community stability. Dating back some 15 to 20 million years, close comparison of these exquisitely preserved ...

(Phys.org)—It was an interesting week for physics as a team made up of international researchers came up with a new theory that says dark matter acts like a well-known particle—they suggest it has similarities to pions, ...

The Tyrannosaurus rex and its fellow theropod dinosaurs that rampage across the screen in movies like Jurassic World were successful predators partly due to a unique, deeply serrated tooth structure that allowed them to easily ...

The first human inhabitants of the Americas lived in a time thousands of years before the first written records, and the story of their transcontinental migration is the subject of ongoing debate and active research. A study ...